Google apparently disabled the code when contacted by the Wall Street Journal.

"The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser."

The software patent system is totally askew. We need to look no further to see this than the recent news that Apple was granted a patent on sliding to unlock a mobile device. (Edit: It actually was granted back in February, but the case pinged again, and so we're all revisiting it.) It's bad enough that a governing body somewhere actually believes that you or I aren't smart enough to come to the natural conclusion on our own (that's basically what a patent means - it's a unique idea or process), but the fact that it existed on an old Windows CE device in 2005 was totally overlooked.

The "slide to unlock" element is at about 4:00 in the accompanying video. If any patent lawyers are reading, they'll be able to point out the difference(s) between Apple's patent and this implementation. (Thanks @char2006 for the link.)

The [DoCoMo] deal [in Japan] was a breakthrough for Macromedia. Instead of giving away the flash client, the way it had on the PC, Macromedia could charge for the client, have it forced into the hands of every user, and continue to also make money selling development tools. The company had found a way to have its cake and eat it too! In late 2004, the iMode deal was extended worldwide (link), and I'm sure Macromedia had visions of global domination. Unfortunately for Flash, Japan is a unique phone market, and DoCoMo is a unique operator. The DoCoMo deal could not be duplicated on most phone platforms other than iMode. Macromedia, and later Adobe, was now trapped by its own success. To make Flash Lite a standard in mobile, it would have needed to give away the player, undercutting its lucrative DoCoMo deal. When you have a whole business unit focused on making money from licensing the player, giving it away would mean missing revenue projections and laying off a lot of people. Macromedia chose the revenue, and Flash Lite never became a mobile standard.

More trouble followed. A very interesting potted history with smart lessons.

On Pinterest, every pin ties back to an external link. We used RJMetrics to extract the top-level domain of those links for the pins in our sample. What we found was a pretty tremendous long-tail effect. In our sample of about a million pins, over 100,000 distinct source domains existed.

Top pin sources: Etsy; Google Image Search (so actually other sites); Flickr; Tumblr (more third-party stuff?). After the top 5, no domain represents more than 1% of pins. Basically, Pinterest is the long tail turned into a website.